Eileen’s reply — “I don’t have to think. I’m Catholic” — could have been milked for derisive laughs, especially given the blaring trombone of Ms. Turner’s imperious voice. But she delivers those words as the pained response of a flustered woman desperately defending long-toppled barricades of propriety.

Her performance is the deepest and truest element in this shallow feel-good movie about the clash between gay rights and Catholic orthodoxy in a generic suburban town named Chester. The dialogue in the film, directed by Anne Renton from a screenplay by Claire V. Riley and Paula Goldberg, has the loud, mechanical clicketyclack of a 40-year-old episode of “All in the Family.”

With some tonal adjustments, Ms. Turner could have given a thunderous, scenery-chewing performance that turned the self-advertised “dysfunctional-family comedy” into camp. By restraining herself and making Eileen sympathetic, she gives “The Perfect Family” a seed of humanity.

Eileen’s long-deferred moment of truth arrives when her priest, Monsignor Murphy (Richard Chamberlain, at his most reptilian, and affecting a brogue), tells her she is a leading candidate for the parish’s Catholic Woman of the Year. To receive the award, which is accompanied by a prayer of absolution from a visiting Irish bishop (Hansford Rowe), letters of recommendation must be sent, and family members interviewed. The other leading candidate, Agnes Dunn (Sharon Lawrence), is Eileen’s snippy, manipulative longtime rival from high school days.

Shannon’s sexual orientation and the fact that unbeknown to Eileen, she is pregnant by artificial insemination and plans to marry her live-in girlfriend, Angela Reyes (Angelique Cabral), are complications Eileen has refused to face. Before the prim committee members arrive at the house to conduct interviews, Eileen feels obliged to hide the Alcoholics Anonymous literature of her husband, Frank (Michael McGrady), a good-hearted recovering alcoholic.

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We’ve already learned that the marriage of their son, Frank Jr. (Jason Ritter), a firefighter like his father, is on the rocks and that he is having an affair with an older local manicurist. Moments before the committee arrives, he drunkenly stumbles into the house and has to be hustled out of sight. But the farcical “Cage aux Folles” cover-up scene, which might have given the movie a badly needed shot of hilarity, never materializes.

Even Eileen, for all her prayers and good works, has a skeleton buried in her closet, and it’s a whopper. By the time its bones are rattled, “The Perfect Family” has turned into an extended illustration of the adage “You’re only as sick as your secrets,” and it is time for a group hug.